Be True To Your School

‘Smile’ – My First 25 Years : Inside Pop – some comments

In order to properly appreciate Inside Pop – The Rock Revolution, and its significance in the Smile saga, it takes a kind of mental time-travel – and this is a useful trans-temporal handbook:

Paul Williams was/is the editor of Crawdaddy! (“America’s earliest rock magazine”), and, at the age of 18,

first got high on marijuana…with Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, in late December 1966….and heard wonderful, mysterious, unearthly music when he played Smile sessions acetates for me.

How Deep Is The Ocean reprints all of Williams’ significant writings about Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, from snippets of early Crawdaddy! news items (Dec ’66/Jan ’67: “The next Beach Boys album is now named Smile; nearly all the songs were written by Brian in collboration with Van Dyke Parks, organist on many Beach Boys and Byrds tracks”) through to a 1997 conversation (Smile Is Done, with David Anderle). Via Williams’ various writings, plus his previous conversations with Anderle post-Smile (alongside Jules Siegel’s Goodbye Surfing, Hello God, and journalism by Tom Nolan, Nick Kent etc., most of which is reprinted in Back To The Beach), Smile-lore as we know it became what it is now: Williams and Siegel heard Smile as it was being recorded, along with David Oppenheim, the writer and producer of Inside Pop.

The solo Brian recording of Surf’s Up, as heard on the Good Vibrations box in 1993 (and which was the core of the 1971 ‘official’ reconstruction), was

recorded for the first time in December [1966] in Columbia Records’ Studio A for a CBS-TV pop music documentary. Earlier in the evening the film crew had covered a Beach Boys vocal session which had gone very badly (from Siegel’s Goodbye Surfing, Hello God)

(The unsatisfactory vocal session was for Wonderful backing vocals, according to The Smile Sessions sessionography. What the issue was with this session isn’t made clear, and isn’t included on the 2011 release; film footage obviously existed at one time, as Inside Pop outtakes, although it has never been located, despite efforts. Certain Beach Boys may never want it to surface…)

David Oppenheim spent some time around Brian Wilson, prior to the filming of Surf’s Up at Brian Wilson’s home, on the 17th of December 1966; and Oppenheim is presumably making his own assessment of Brian, as ‘one of today’s most important pop musicians’, on the basis of what he had seen and heard from Smile sessions.

Watching CBS News’ window into ‘the ferment that characterises todays pop music scene’ (via the 21st century’s most popular time-portal) is a very curious experience. It’s a real surprise how well-constructed its various arguments actually are: the prospect of an ‘establishment’ figure like Bernstein discussing the merits of low-culture could have been similar to the meeting between Hans Keller and Barrett’s Pink Floyd on the BBC (and if you’ve not seen this Year Zero marker before, it’s here – Keller might come across as pompous and supercilious, and, to Floyd fans, the guy’s an idiot – but he isn’t). But here Bernstein is offering a real insight for his CBS News viewers – and at a crucial moment in the development of what is now Western culture’s predominant artistic medium:

Now what does all this mean?

I think it’s all part of a historic revolution, one that has been going on for 50 years – only now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium, the phonograph record. And the music on the records, with its noise and its cool messages, may make us uneasy. But we must take it seriously, as both a symptom and a generator of this revolution. We must listen to it, and to its makers, this new breed of young people with long hair and fanciful clothing.

And when Inside Pop is cited as the source for the solo Surf’s Up clip, Bernstein’s overall thesis rarely gets a mention. Domenic Priore uses the above quotation in his 2011 Smile Sessions essay The (Original) Teenage Symphony To God; but the clip itself, when presented in Beach Boys official narratives (An American Band, Endless Harmony etc.), removes Oppenheim’s opening and closing comments – the Smile segment in An American Band replaces the latter with

Van Dyke Parks:(loudly on voiceover) SURF’S UP. WAS THE FIRST SONG THAT BRIAN AND I WROTE. FOR THE SMILE ALBUM.

(It wasn’t – and Van Dyke’s comment sounds more like a tape composite: compare his stilted statement with what follows). Erasing Oppenheim’s observations also removes the identification of Brian Wilson as the ‘Leader of The Beach Boys’.

The Beach Boys’ capitalised on Surf’s Up‘s notoriety (by concocting the title track for their 1971 album) in order to give an otherwise uncommercial and focus-free collection of songs a much-needed selling point. Album sessions had not been endlessly harmonious:

(January through early April 1971) Beach Boys manager Jack Rieley tells Scott Keller in 1974: “Carl and I began to write…Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston began to get irritable about it all. There was a long meeting during which they tried to force me to march into [Warners boss] Mo Ostin’s office and sell him on their 1969 track ‘Loop De Loop’. I refused and Brian, Dennis and Carl backed me up. Love, sensing that I might be on to something by rejecting their ‘string-of-hits’ crap as out of date, suddenly came up with ‘Student Demonstration Time’, which had Carl and I blushing with embarressment and which thoroughly disgusted Dennis. Then Jardine demanded that his track ‘Take A Load Off Your Feet’ should go on the album”. Etc. (from Keith Badman’s Definitive Diary)

Of the title track itself,

(mid June through early July 1971)…shortly before the new recordings are set to begin, Brian changes his mind about revisiting the song…generally Brian stays away from the song, presumably because of the negative memories associated with the Smile era…

Had it not been featured in Inside Pop in ’67, Surf’s Up would never have augmented the Reprise-rejected Landlocked album in ’71; we would probably only know the song via bootlegs (sharing a similar status to Do You Like Worms, Love To Say Dada etc) – and thus a revelation in 1993, rather than the desperate approximation everyone knows from the early 70s.

It’s also interesting to consider the company Brian Wilson shares in Inside Pop.

Leonard Bernstein’s segment highlights Janis Ian‘s Society’s Child, but also acknowledges The Beatles, The Association, The Left Banke, Bob Dylan, I’m A Believer, and Paint It Black. Interestingly, Bernstein doesn’t mention either The Beach Boys or Brian Wilson – which could be explained by Pet Sounds‘ (relative) lack of commercial success (and promotional support from Capitol Records) in the US. But it’s possible to find everything Bernstein highlights as ‘real inventions’ on Pet Sounds, and even more so in Smile – of Good Day Sunshine, Bernstein says

What a way to fade out: in a new key, a shifting meter, a sudden new counterpoint…but that’s The Beatles, always unpredictable, a little more inventive than most

which must surely (unwittingly) acknowledge God Only Knows‘ influence upon that track, and, by extension, Pet Sounds‘ influence upon Revolver (released in August 1966).

There is also the issue of familiarity for a 21st century viewer.

Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn were released in 1965, Paint It Black, Pretty Ballerina, Along Came Mary and I’m A Believer were all hits in 1966, and Society’s Child only became a hit after Bernstein eulogised it. For a modern rock music consumer, with any grasp of phonographic history, all of these songs (bar Society’s Child) should be very familiar indeed. But Inside Pop‘s audience might never have heard them before – remember that this is a CBS News broadcast about

the gap – the aching gap – between the two generations. We of the middle ages trying to understand, the young ones trying to explain

Therefore, rather than an anachronistic snapshot of the beginnings of rock music as an artform, Inside Pop is actually a ‘primary source’: for the roots of what has become the late 20th/early 21st century’s predominant cultural product, and in understanding the ‘pop music scene’ that Smile would have been released into.

Although Bernstein features throughout the first third of the broadcast, the rest of Inside Pop is the work of David Oppenheim. And Oppenheim seems to have spent some time with his subjects, and as a conscious effort to understand.

The UFO were actually called The UFOs (or The Unidentified Flying Objects) , and Inside Pop seems to have been their moment. There is a youtube clip here that has both a brief performance (from ‘hippie exploitation flick’, The Love-Ins, says the youtube uploader) plus excerpts from their Oppenheim interview. There was also a press clipping here.

Frank Cook was never ‘The Leader of Canned Heat‘ – Bob Hite or Al Wilson would have rightly disputed this (Cook was their drummer for a brief period), but he may have convinced Oppenheim otherwise – he is opinionated and antagonistic in conversation, while still saying almost nothing of worth. According to wikipedia,

[in 1967] Canned Heat also began to garner their notoriety as “the bad boys of rock” for being jailed in Denver, Colorado after a Denver Police informant provided enough evidence for their arrest for drugs (an incident recalled in their song ‘My Crime’)…after the Denver incident, Frank Cook was replaced with Fito de la Parra

which suggests that Cook may have had more than a little involvement in ‘the Denver incident’. Guy seems a bit of dick here:

Frank Cook : my band Canned Heat, what we’re trying to do is, tell OUR story. And in telling our story, having people understand where we’re at, and what we’re trying to do

which, for anyone familiar with Canned Heat’s derivation from older blues sources, seems a little rich…Stephen Calt’s book I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues has James as utterly dismissive of the calibre of the benefactors of his ‘rediscovery’ (being Calt, John Fahey and Al Wilson amongst others), white college-boy nerds – and Cook looks and sounds the part here.

Everybody else comes across better, even if, in retrospect, they might seem somewhat naive…but that is bringing a post-1966/7 perspective to bear on what must have (briefly) seemed like the coming of a New Society.

The Gentle Soul recorded one album; while it might now have the status of a ‘lost psych-folk classic’ (and even the deleted Sundazed 2003 reissue is in demand), it was ignored at the time. And, to my ears anyway, it’s pretty lightweight stuff – there were many better albums released in 1967. But an audience for these ‘lost’ albums holds it dear.

The fact of these musicians’ lack of commercial success in 1966/67 does not in any way negate what they say. In some ways their perspectives become more valid: they want to be a part of this ‘new thing’ – and not necessarily for commercial gain.

Tim Buckley left ‘protest songs’ (along with pop music, and everybody else) behind, starting with the release of 1969′s Happy Sad album, and made some truly innovative music, specifically Side One of Lorca (for Elektra) and Starsailor (for Zappa’s Straight label). But audience indifference meant that his astonishing band were never widely seen or heard until the DVD of My Fleeting House was released in 2007.

The Byrds are heard only in passing, although Jim (pre-Roger; more about this later) McGuinn seems almost gleeful in anticipation of a societal shift, that might yet come via the ‘rock revolution’.

And Frank Zappa, typically, seems both the most cynical (especially about the ‘drug revolution’), and the most forward-looking

a lot of the kids that are walking around the streets with long hair, a lot of the kids that you see from time to time – and retch over – are gonna be running your government for you

and

after they stop taking drugs, and stop kidding themselves with their, er, fantasies, and they’d straighten up a little bit (pauses), grab themselves a little sense of responsibility, I think everything will turn out all right. That is if they aren’t killed off systematically beforehand

Certain mindsets might argue that some of them were ‘killed off systematically‘ (and usually at the age of 27), but that’s a crank can of worms for a whole other corner of the internet. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were also gleeful ‘guerrillas’ in this psychotropic revolt…

In the world of pop success, Inside Pop feaures Herman’s Hermits, who had some hits in the US at the height of Anglophilia (and by over-Englishing themselves with songs they never released as singles in the UK – possibly for fear of derision) – wikipedia says that

in 1965 and 1966, the group rivalled The Beatles on the charts and was the top-selling pop act in the US in 1965. On The Beatles Anthology video, there is a brief interview with a young girl in the audience attending The Beatles’ second appearance at Shea Stadium. When asked why The Beatles did not sell out the venue this time, she replied that they were not as popular anymore and that she preferred Herman’s Hermits.

Graham Nash went on to far greater success, after leaving The Hollies in 1968, to form Crosby Stills and Nash. And Graham Gouldman was part of 10CC, who acknowledge the profound influence The Beach Boys had on them.

And, of course, Brian Wilson, as ‘leader of the famous Beach Boys’, went on to…well, his role in Inside Pop is in many ways comparable to the now-obscure UFO(s): after this, nothing – or certainly nothing worthy of Oppenheim’s attention. Despite the acknowledgement of Brian Wilson as ‘one of today’s most important pop musicians’, Brian retained this commanding role for less than two months: on June 11th 1967, The Beach Boys held the 5th session for Smiley Smile, and the first in Brian’s ‘home studio’; the next Beach Boys release was no longer a product of this leadership. Everybody knows where it all went next:

Sept/Oct 1967: Smiley Smile…is not the same album as the much anticipated Smile. The latter was to be a full collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, and would hve included Surf’s Up…What happened to it? The gap between conception and realization was too great, and nothing satisfied Brian by the time he’d worked it out and gotten it on tape…Smile is the one that got away. (excerpted from Crawdaddy! news item, reprinted in How Deep Is The Ocean)

Had Smile been released in 1967, it would probably have been bought by the differing audiences for The Gentle Soul and Herman’s Hermits. It would have vindicated the faith of David Oppenheim and Paul Williams; John Hartmann‘s comment in Inside Pop is more prescient even than Zappa’s:

oh I think the West Coast of the United States is going to breathe an EXPLOSION of poetry and music – it is going to lead the way for the American youth.

It did. But, try as The Beach Boys might, they would never be a part of this explosion.

The influence of the West Coast of The United States on popular music was absolute – the rock ‘list mind’, with its Greatest Albums Ever Made, usually ends up looking like variations upon this, Mojo Magazine‘s own list from 1995. Of this hundred, 20 or so are products of the West Coast, and many of these were made during, or not long after the ‘Rock Revolution’ Inside Pop is investigating.

Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967-1976 observes how many of these singer-songwriters and ‘cocaine cowboys’ originated from one LA venue, The Troubadour. And Inside Pop‘s subjects seem equally as interconnected: Van Dyke Parks, as session player, worked with Zappa (briefly), Tim Buckley (on his first album), The Gentle Soul (keyboard player), The Byrds (on Fifth Dimension), and Brian Wilson (obviously).

LA may have ‘lead the way for the American youth‘, but, inevitably, ‘the kids that are gonna BECOME ADULTS’ (says Graham Nash) ‘running your government for you’ (says Zappa) became the ‘establishment’. Musically, this was part of what punk was for…but this is not the place for a reductionist potted history of something anybody who may have read thus far knows already. Rock history is deadly dull. Music history, on the other hand…

The Beach Boys, as a significant musical entity, ceased to matter to The American Youth after the release of Smiley Smile, after their non-appearance at Monterey, etcetera etctera etcetera. Even Student Demonstration Time in 1971 failed to persuade the younger people that they weren’t irrelevant. Strangely.

But most any LA bands or artist that ‘mattered’ in 66/67 either split up, got shit real quick, died – or went on to massive worldwide success, and slept on a huge pile of money with many beautiful ladies. Music, ethics, revolution, it all got kinda swept away once people like Clive Davis (of Columbia Records) started waving wads of cash at Monterey’s unsigned artists.

Is there a point to all of these disconnected observations? This endless stating of the obvious? There is. Three points.

Bear with me.

Bernstein says ‘now these young people have gotten control of a mass medium, the phonograph record’ – and, while he discusses songs, and by extension the 45RPM single, if Inside Pop were made six months later, he would be talking about albums.

In How Deep Is The Ocean, Paul Williams reprints a piece from the December 1967 Crawdaddy! called Outlaw Blues, ostensibly about the Beach Boys Party! album. Like most of Williams’ 60s writings, it has a weird prescience, but one comment is especially interesting:

During 1967 rock music, thanks to Beatles Doors Airplane etc., greatly expanded its audience to the point where two-thirds of the people buying any records at all were buying rock albums.

The ‘rock list mind’ would have you believe that ‘rock albums’ were all anyone ever bought. It all started in 1967 – everything else before that was just ‘tuning up’ (to paraphrase an ignorant historian). And ‘rock history’ now dominates any consideration of music history. The 12″ vinyl album became the predominate format for music distribution, but, more importantly, the predominate musical artform. And even lists that exclude this Greatest Ever canon is still a reaction to that canon; any Year Zero white popular music movement (punk, post-punk, rave, whatever) is (at least in part) a reaction against what was seeded by ‘the ferment’ of 66/67.

This is an interesting book:

While Dylan and Janis Joplin are pictured on the front cover collage, popular music, as perceived by post-1967 consumers, begins on page 714, with rock and roll; rock music starts on page 799. Who are all these other people? Well it’s obvious who some of them are, and that’s Leonard Bernstein at bottom left. But, these days, of what relevance are pages 1 to 713? Didn’t this all get swept away by The Beatles, Sgt Pepper, and The Rock Revolution?

people are sometimes surprised to learn that composers are still writing [music] at all.

And, later, he talks about ‘a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward’ – he is discussing ‘histories of music since 1900′, but could as easily be writing about the history of popular recorded music since the introduction of the long-playing record (by Columbia in 1948), and as perceived from our current vantage point:

When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say. These pieces often happen to be those that have found a broader public…

Bernstein, when talking about Good Day Sunshine, says

You see, just one sudden bar of 3 among all those fours. We never used to find that in pop music. It’s new.

and it’s The New that rock music keeps thinking it fucking invented. It didn’t.

Example: The Beatles were the first pop musicians to use backwards tape. Ask “Mr Music” – he’ll tell you that it was on either Rain or Revolution. However, Ferrante and Teicher used backward tape (and to amazing effect) on a version of The Lady Is A Tramp, a track on their Dynamic Twin Pianos album, in 1960

It’s a small point, and, if one wanted to counter it as moot, qualifiers such as ‘first single’, ‘first hit record’ etc. could be used – but all this succeeds in doing is, eventually, to keep that credit for innovation with The Beatles. Ferrante and Teicher were making popular music – but the wrong kind of popular music for a post-Sgt Pepper audience.

Bernstein argues for a ‘newness’ in The Beatles that is actually way more technical – but it could also be argued that The Beatles got their 3/4 innovations, the use of rounds etc. from Pet Sounds. And I would be surprised if Les Paul’s catalogue of startling pop records (from the late 1940s onwards) doesn’t contain some backwards tape quirks…

But who cares about Les Paul and Mary Ford, or Ferrante and Teicher? Not the canonical ‘rock mind’.

In Jorge Luis Borges‘ essay Kafka And His Precursors (in Labyrinths) the author says that ‘at first I had considered [Kafka] to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise’ ie. Franz Kafka has no literary precedents; but ‘I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods’, and proceeds to delineate a few. Borges’ conclusions are interesting:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant.

What do any of the recording artists mentioned by David Toop above have in common? Not that much. But where might they all meet? In Smile. What Smile could have been would have been NEW – but it was also as a synthesis of as much of America’s history (musical and societal) as Brian and Van Dyke could cram onto two sides of a vinyl LP. Intentionally or unconsciously, via Wilson/Parks’ musical influences, or via their shared immersion in America’s history, and America’s musical life.

That’s Point One.

What was Point Two? Oh yeah.

Inside Pop prophetically showcases the seeds of (at least) the next ten years of what rock music would become: guitars, pop, rock, singer-songwriters, the personal and the social, societal revolution and artistic innovation…a change. A 21st century viewer can see in Inside Pop (if they look past its dated veneer) a bunch of templates of what was to follow.

But while Surf’s Up, ‘a new song – too complex to get all of first time around [that] could come only out of the ferment that characterises todays pop music scene’, is also new – it’s also a synthesis of all of these other templates: it’s pop, rock, it’s a personal expression and a social one, touching upon societal revolution (‘surf’s up!’), while not being any one of any of these (and there is no rock guitar)…and, as, session sheets indicate, it was composed as ‘movements’. Surf’s Up was always conceived of as a new type of pop song composition. Being placed at the culmination of Inside Pop was not arbitrary.

And Smile, and Surf’s Up as example, could have been another template.

And Point Three?

If, as Paul Williams points out in Outlaw Blues, ‘two-thirds of the people buying any records at all were buying rock albums’, what were they buying before The Rock Revolution? Was the record-buying public sitting around waiting for ‘Beatles Doors Airplane etc.’ albums? Maybe. But maybe not…

Smile‘s possible lack of potential chart appeal is often retrospectively considered, and especially against the innovations of Sgt Pepper. Would Smile have been a hit album, if it were released as intended, dense with all of that cranky and obtuse stuff?

If you trawl back through America’s popular music history, amongst the stuff Bernstein says ‘this pop generation has rejected’,

that old chromatic sound…the sound of an older, slicker generation…the old-fashioned sound of the cocktail lounge

you can find some real crazy music, and crazy (and innovative) music, bought by adults, in quantity…Brian Wilson’s characterising of the (unreleased, original) Heroes & Villains single “as a three minute musical comedy” was more in keeping with an older use of the single format (whether at 78 or 45) as an entertainment. When Frank Zappa asked (rhetorically) ‘does humor belong in music?’, a lot of listeners would have answered with a resounding NO (I’ve asked this question to a bunch of knowledgeable people, and this is often their response). Rock music, in its seriousness, eradicated forever the value of this kind of musical entertainment.

There’s a very distinguished writer named Arthur Koestler, and, after a lot of careful research and study and all that in his life he discovered that the human mind is broken up into three categories: first is Humour, second is science, which he calls Discovery, and the third is Art. Now, the one thing that really blew me out about that book was that the first rule of ego is humour – in other words, when people get together, they’re more apt to want to be funny, out of INSTINCT and EGO, than they are artistic or scientific…you know, like, intellectual.

‘That book’ is Koestler’s The Act Of Creation, cited as key to an understanding of Smile‘s intention by Bill Tobelman in his Zen Interpretation of Smile. And what Brian Wilson seemed to want to convey, through Smile, was a function for humour in music: to take that idea of an old-fashioned ‘entertainment’, and to utilise it for some of the same hopes and aims as the other Inside Pop interviewees: to facilitate a change.

As a pop record, Smile‘s immediacy would have been ‘serious’ and humorous, light and ‘heavy’, all at the same time. This was also new.

Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were developing a brand new type of music.

I could go on forever…so, two final things to ponder:

1: Rock History seems to consider the ‘rock revolution’ as both necessary and inevitable. However, in Paul Williams’ 1967 Outlaw Blues piece, he repeatedly mentions coincidence. And while he notes that,

during the summer of 1967, by some awesome coincidence, the size and interests of the buying audience coincided nicely with the quantity and quality of rock albums newly available to them..But already in December 1967 the difficulties are apparent. For one thing, there are quite a number of good groups making records, and they all expect a slice of the pie.

There might already be too many albums, and not enough audience.

Rock music is the first good music in quite a while to achieve a mass acceptance. It is also one of the few really worthy side-effects of of the current state of mass media in the Western world. Because many rock musicians, rock producers, rock etcetera do not appreciate the significance of this, we are in serious danger of blowing the whole bit.

Within nine months of Inside Pop‘s broadcast, Crawdaddy! worries that rock music risks losing everything that Oppenheim’s documentary promised. And maybe it already had – but rock’s ever-expanding audience never noticed.

Domenic Priore’s Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! reprints an hilarious (and undated, but presumably from the 1980s) mini-essay, which confirms Wiliams’ concerns (on p.220 of the Last Gasp edition). And while I don’t necessarily agree with what the author thinks rock & roll should be, I’m sympathetic to the sentiment:

We’re never going to recover. That’s all there is to it. No matter how hard we try, rock & roll will never be as cool as it was before The Beatles put out the Sgt. Pepper album and ruined everything…what bothers me is the influence it had on the rest of the pop world and how it was responsible for what is now known as progressive rock. Let’s face it. The whole problem began when ordinary teen groups started thinking they were artists with something to say…Imagine, if you will, a world without Genesis, Yes (talk about ivory tower bullshit. Those guys probably ride unicorns to the studio), or Roger Dean album covers!

I could go on forever…[but] the next time you hear Phil Collins, Rush or Bauhaus, stop and thank The Beatles.

And 2: what do you suppose The Beach Boys thought when this flashed up on their TV screen, as they watched Inside Pop after their show at Westchester County Center, in White Plains, NY:

Unless it’s called something like “all people with beards who like comics are pricks” I probably will – I don’t have problems with people disagreeing with me.

For example I know you will be utterly against the recently announced reunion, while I’m cautiously optimistic (because the backing band is Brian’s band plus the two best members from Mike’s band, because every decision regarding Brian’s career I’ve worried about since 1999 has ended up being good for him so I trust his management now, and because having seen Mike, Bruce and David in 2008 they actually seem to have realised the worth of their more interesting music forty years after everyone else did).

But I’m far more interested in hearing a good argument against my own views than a bad argument for them (your email, which I never replied to, bad correspondent that I am, had a good point about Love possibly being a psychopath which I’d never considered but which fits the facts).

Very interesting essay! I am not familiar with the specific Frank Cook/Canned Heat quote that you’ve referenced. However, it is correct that Frank Cook was the band’s drummer, not their leader; that role was mostly shared by multi-instrumentalist Alan Wilson and vocalist Bob Hite.

Cook was in the band for a brief period at the beginning of their career (I’d say probably a year or so, if memory serves). He was replaced by Fito de la Parra who has been the band’s drummer ever since, and has kept Canned Heat going since the death of Hite in the early 1980s.

In the late 1990s, I was honored to interview Frank Cook for my bio of Wilson, “Blind Owl Blues”. Currently I’m offering a discount on this book to select US customers, and would like to include your blog readers in this. I hope they’ll enjoy this unique look at Canned Heat’s mysterious musical genius, the Blind Owl, who was also known for his uncanny rapport with elderly bluesmen like Son House and John Lee Hooker.

Interesting that the H. Gertz article about Sgt. Peppers ruining rock n roll forever mirrors the effect of acid upon the individual. There’s the “if you take it you can never go back to the way it was before” truism about acid and Gertz’s article about music seems to suggest that the same principle applies to music.